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Padua for Greek people, July 3, 2015. Demotix/Ferdinando Piezza. All rights reserved.It has been a very dark week for Greece,
and for Europe too. A week where our hopes for an alternative European Union violently
collapsed, giving way to a dystopian present that for most Greeks, after five
years of brutally imposed austerity is all the more unbearable.

The unprecedented showcase of power and
utter humiliation by Europe’s criminal-gangs-in-suits seems to have buried our
hopes in the ground. Or has it? What can be learned from this before we rise up
again?

First, the quasi-Orientalist attack on
Greece, an attack driven by neo-colonial logics of financial capital and
executed through popular discourse and cultural narratives, should by now be
indisputable. It is an attack that has quite forcefully and relentlessly succeeded
in portraying Greeks as morally inferior subjects worthy of their own fate.

No surprise then, that many Europeans still believe Merkel and Schauble’s
response was “well deserved” and fair enough punishment for the kind of
irresponsible nation that Greece has proved to be. For a while now, mainstream
and yellow press media across Europe have naturalised Greeks as irresponsible,
lazy, corrupt, irrational and in the words of Christine Lagarde, lacking
“adult-like” qualities.

It was unsurprising, for example, that
during last week’s Eurogroup meeting, there were media allegations that the new
Greek finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos left his proposals on the plane
(accompanied with a spoof image) and that he commited “schoolboy” errors. Equally
unsurprising is the ongoing media sensation constructed around Yanis
Varoufakis, the former finance minister who rode a bike, spoke loudly and
looked rather too cool and “wild” for a respectable, middle-of-the-middle
politician. Above all, these were politicians not to be judged on the basis of
their words or actions but on the basis of their exoticness.

It is at this level that we should attempt
to explain how European elites succeeded in colonising the Greek nation. After
all, Orientalist discourse has long created these conditions of possibility elsewhere, the possibility that a nation
state can be rightfully subordinated by another, for instance, by using its
assets as collateral. Logics of financial capital become all the more powerful
when successfully blended with cultural logics.

From now on, we need to keep our “orientalist
radar” active wherever we go, whoever we talk to.

Second, we need to counterimpose “our” own
solidarity(ies). We should no longer trust to the capacity of the top-down
transnational (and national) institutions of Europe to channel a progressive
model of solidarity and social justice.

The emerging model of “European solidarity”
is as bleak as is the future of the Greeks. It is a model that “goes
hand-in-hand with responsibility”, a model whereby “advantages must outweigh
the disadvantages” as Merkel recently explained. Conspicuously absent, of course,
was the observation that any advantages so far have been unevenly distributed
to European bankers, not European citizens. More broadly, what exactly are the
foundations and what are the objectives of such solidarity? Who is included and
who is excluded?

Furthermore to what extent does it respect
democracy? And what are the responsibilities that should go hand-in-hand with
this? One thing is certain - that it is not up to the Greeks (and soon enough
to the Portuguese, Spanish, Italians etc.) to decide, as they are essentially
irresponsible. In so far as solidarity always entails a “we” and a “they”, Greeks
are already Othered. We know already that when the end of the road to Grexit approaches,
all “they” can be assured of is some humanitarian aid, a final act of
benevolence and a show of moral superiority by those in power.

Edward Said, a key theorist of Orientalism,
would probably agree that this latter observation, the fact that Greece will be
the recipient not so much of European solidarity as of its philanthropy, is
perhaps the most telling sign of all that the country has already become the Orient.
It is no longer securely placed within the (free, democratic, moral) West and
hence it has become a potential threat, an Other that needs to be carefully
managed, if not quarantined and controlled.

Yet in the streets of Athens, Barcelona and
Berlin one can find far more progressive models of solidarity than those
articulated in some hallways in Brussels. Models that have long insisted on
seeing and thinking across difference and distance, across class, race, age and
gender. It is time to reclaim European solidarity.

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